I don't see how talking about abject failures of leadership and policy response in the first term is "outdated" when the second term is essentially a doubling down on these derelictions of duty.
Are we just supposed to forget those past failures in favor of focusing on the current catastrophe? What tariff tantrum? What Greenland treachery? Don't you know we've always been at war with Iran?
Ha! This is the first time I've even tried the Win10 Search bar in months after constant disappointment from it, and it doesn't even load for me nowadays:
Appealing to the pragmatic and the "game theory" of complying with authoritarian rule that you don't have power over - because the other party that you don't have any power over will benefit from it - is a zero-sum argument.
Procurement decisions are not authoritarian rule. A government agency deciding that a vendor doesn't meet its operational requirements and setting a timeline to transition off that vendor is one of the most ordinary functions of institutional management. Every organization, public or private, does this. Authoritarian rule involves the coercive suppression of rights or autonomy. Choosing not to renew a contract with a provider who has voluntarily excluded itself from your use case is the opposite of coercion; it's respecting that provider's choice and acting accordingly.
The "zero-sum" label is equally off-base. Zero-sum describes a situation where one party's gain is necessarily another's loss, and that is precisely the nature of military capability competition. If an adversary fields unrestricted AI systems and you field restricted ones, the gap is real and the consequences are asymmetric. You don't have to like that reality, but calling it a zero-sum argument as though it's a rhetorical trick misidentifies what's actually a structural condition. The term you seem to be reaching for is something closer to "fear-based reasoning" or "false dilemma," but neither of those applies cleanly here either, because the competitive dynamic being described is well-documented and not hypothetical.
If there's a genuine objection to be made, and there may well be, it has to engage with the specifics: whether the restrictions in question actually matter operationally, whether the transition plan is proportionate, whether the policy creates worse risks than it solves. That's where the real debate is.
Well then what was the point? If you gave them an ID that matches your name and DOB, they still got an identity vector that can conclusively match to your physical, government-acknowledged identity.
Not having a correct photo or license number didn't really mean anything to them if their OCR didn't have any half-decent verification that would look at the fields where that information was expected to be, anyway.
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